Abstract:Global competition has increased the importance of patents as a means to protect and strengthen technology and competitiveness. The purposes of our study were to identify what industries in South Korea are strong or weak in terms of patent applications and to identify some strategies to enable weak industries to become strong. For this, we gathered statistics on seven variables as follows: number of businesses, number of employees, research and development investment, number of full-time equivalent researchers, number of research institutions, domestic market size, and number of patent applications. Especially, to compare the ratio of patent applications and the ratio of domestic market size across industries, the industries were classified into the following three categories: strong-, weak-, and no-patent. Furthermore, data envelopment analysis (DEA) suggested some strategies to strengthen patent applications for each industry. In the DEA analysis, the number of patent applications was used as the output variable and the other six variables were used as input variables. Our study will particularly assist industries where protection by patents is an important aspect of their businesses.

In this research, we studied the relation of research and development (R&D) investment to turnover and number of listed companies by using the financial information of publicly listed enterprises in all industrial fields of the world from 2007 to 2015. First of all, the present condition (as of 2017) of number and distribution of publicly listed enterprises was investigated. Secondly, the industrial areas having top 10 average turnovers and R&D expenses during 9 years (2007~2015) were analyzed by using their descriptive statistics and CAGR values. Finally, the analyses of correlation and linear regression were performed by using average R&D expense (independent variable) and average turnover or the number of listed enterprises (dependent variables). In other words, two models with different combination of independent and dependent variables (Model A: R&D expense and turnover, Model B: R&D expense and number of listed firms) were developed for the statistical analyses. As a result, it was confirmed that both the turnover and the number of listed companies were influenced by the R&D investment because the coefficients of determination for Model A and Model B were 0.686 and 0.612, respectively (both pvalues < 2.2 × 10 − 16 ). From the results of this study, it is expected that the unlisted firms (e.g., start-up companies) can build the basis of their growth and innovation when they invest in R&D higher inducing the increases in (1) turnover and (2) probability of becoming a listed firm. Thus, the financial information of enterprises can be utilized effectively as the quantitative evidence in order to develop the research model and methodology related to their growth and innovation.

In this study, the investigation into basic methodology for selecting the industrial areas suitable to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea was performed by using the statistical data about the corporations (2010~2012) as the quantitative evidences containing the number of companies, the number of workers, the annual sales, and the indices of market concentration and growth potential. From the Statistics Korea and the KISTI Market Analysis and Prediction System (K-MAPS), the statistical data organized by the Korean Standard Industrial Classification (KSIC) were obtained to conduct this research through the following procedure. First of all, the numbers of enterprises and employees and the annual sales of all industries were investigated and the largest number of workers and the highest annual sales were found in the sector of manufacturing among all sectors of KSIC. Secondly, the top three divisions with the highest annual sales in all divisions of manufacturing sector were selected. Thirdly, the subclasses having high values of annual sales and SMEs proportions among all subclasses in the top three divisions of the previous step were chosen as the candidates of SMEs-recommendable fields. Fourthly, the degree of market concentration was analyzed by using three-firm concentration ratio (CR3) and Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI) of the selected subclasses. Finally, the study for growth potential of chosen subclasses was performed through the analysis of compound annual growth rate (CAGR). After the overall process of this study was carried out with the synthetic consideration of the above-mentioned factors, the three subclasses of KSIC as industrial areas suitable to the SMEs could be found: (1) Manufacture of printed circuit boards, (2) Manufacture of parts and accessories for motor engines, and (3) Manufacture of parts and accessories for motor vehicle body. From this result, it was found that the values of annual sales, CR3, HHI, and CAGR can be very useful factors to discover the recommendable industry fields to the SMEs.

Dementia is a cognitive impairment that poses a global threat. Current dementia treatments slow the progression of the disease. The timing of starting such treatment markedly affects the effectiveness of the treatment. Some experts mentioned that the optimal timing for starting the currently available treatment in order to delay progression to dementia is the mild cognitive impairment stage, which is the prior stage of dementia. However, medical records are typically only available at a later stage, i.e., from the early or middle stage of dementia. In order to address this limitation, this study developed a model using national health information data from 5 years prior, to predict dementia development 5 years in the future. The Senior Cohort Database, comprising 550,000 samples, were used for model development. The F-measure of the model predicting dementia development after a 5-year incubation period was 77.38%. Models for a 1- and 3-year incubation period were also developed for comparative analysis of dementia risk factors. The three models had some risk factors in common, but also had unique risk factors, depending on the stage. For the common risk factors, a difference in disease severity was confirmed. These findings indicate that the diagnostic criteria and treatment strategy for dementia should differ depending on the timing. Furthermore, since the results of this study present new dementia risk factors that have not been reported previously, this study may also contribute to identification of new dementia risk factors.

This study uses text and data mining to investigate the relationship between the text patterns of annual reports published by US listed companies and sales performance. Taking previous research a step further, although annual reports show only past and present financial information, analyzing text content can identify sentences or patterns that indicate the future business performance of a company. First, we examine the relation pattern between business risk factors and current business performance. For this purpose, we select companies belonging to two categories of US SIC (Standard Industry Classification) in the IT sector, 7370 and 7373, which include Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. We manually collect sales and business risk information for a total of 54 companies that submitted an annual report (Form 10-K) for the last three years in these two categories. To establish a correlation between patterns of text and sales performance, four hypotheses were set and tested. To verify the hypotheses, statistical analysis of sales, statistical analysis of text sentences, sentiment analysis of sentences, clustering, dendrogram visualization, keyword extraction, and word-cloud visualization techniques are used. The results show that text length has some correlation with sales performance, and that patterns of frequently appearing words are correlated with the sales performance. However, a sentiment analysis indicates that the positive or negative tone of a report is not related to sales performance.